The Apple Pickers

Mr Thomas Balston bequeathed to the Art Fund a large collection of pictures, drawings, and prints, with the request that his extensive collection of works by, after, and connected with John Martin (on whom he had written a monograph) should be offered to the Victoria and Albert Museum, that the Ashmolean Museum should be allowed to take what it wanted of the rest, and that the residue should, so far as possible, be distributed among other public institutions in Great Britain.

Nominally inspired by Lucretius' De rerum natura, Piero di Cosimo's The Forest Fire takes its scientific subject and embellishes it with fantastical creatures from the artist's imagination: Bulls, bears, lions and deer-like creatures with human faces all flee wearily from a fire.

Rubens' portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel dates from about 1629. The Earl was a great collector, and Rubens had painted the earl's wife a few years earlier on a visit to Antwerp. This drawing in pen and ink with a chalk base is unusually informal, reflecting perhaps the comfortable relationship between artist and patron.